The Saturday 3pm slot has been decimated and desecrated more than ever this Premier League season, but it refuses to go quietly.
The third Saturday of the season delivered in style, with a thrilling late win for Sunderland, a desperate face-saving late win for Burnley, the sight of Jack Grealish falling in love with football again in real time, and Spurs crashing Spursily back down to earth with a shocking performance in defeat at home to Bournemouth, who somehow keep on trucking despite having the heart ripped out of their team over the summer.
Andoni Iraola might just be a genius, while Ruben Amorim looks more lucky general after a late VAR intervention spared United more blushes after a truly mortifying week.
Here’s the F365 3pm Blackout on a belting afternoon of fun and games…
Manchester United 3-2 Burnley: Late, late penalty saves United from disaster but not criticism
It says a great deal about Manchester United these days that even when you sit and ponder what a 97th-minute winner might mean as a sliding doors moment for club, player and manager you still come to the conclusion ‘Probably not much’.
There just seems too much too fundamentally broken at Old Trafford – literally and figuratively – for a spawny late home win over a promoted side to mark any kind of significant corner-turning. It will mean slightly less noise and attention through the international break – and gratitude must be extended from one banter club to another here as Spurs gamely take on the mantle after a truly abysmal effort against Bournemouth – but we’ve been here so many times with United, under so many managers.
It’s not even the first time Ruben Amorim’s team have performed absurd acts of late escapology; it’s never really amounted to anything much before, it’s unlikely to do so now. The sheer amount of times they get themselves into these situations remains more compelling than the admittedly often eye-catching times they manage to extract themselves.
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t important. Relegation six-pointers are always big games, and at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter how you win them.
But this was about as unconvincing a win as it’s possible to imagine against a team that had been so thoroughly sorted out on their previous away day. And by United’s banter-club rivals to boot.
Twice Burnley were able to peg United back after falling behind, exposing yet again the fragility at the heart of this team.
The slapstick nature of United’s first goal – ricocheting home off the unfortunate Josh Cullen – and cruelty of the winner, a penalty awarded by VAR in the very last moments of added time, will also temper any talk of this being a game that marks a significant piece of actual progress or development for United.
They have avoided further humiliation at the end of a week that has contained a season’s worth of it already. But no more than that.
Sunderland 2-1 Brentford: Black Cats stage stunning late rally to claim second win of the season
Another late, late Wilson Isidor goal at the Stadium of Light and, while the gloss-applier in a thumping win over West Ham was certainly enjoyable this one might just carry a bit more weight in the final analysis.
Having fallen behind in the 77th minute, to emerge from this game with all three points is a seismic effort from Regis Le Bris’ play-off winners. It also marks a second home win for them against teams among the more obviously vulnerable of the previously Settled Seventeen.
Nothing looks settled now with all three promoted sides showing they are ready and willing to compete. The idea of it being impossible to do so has already been slightly exposed, while it also seems relevant to note that not one of the six teams to perform the promotion-relegation double in the last couple of years has subsequently looked out of place in the Championship.
The fear of a new normal was valid, with each passing season only helping the sides already in place get more and more comfortable, but it really is starting to look more quirk than permanent arrangement, a combination of an undeniable strengthening of the lower reaches of the Premier League with a series of painfully ill-equipped promoted sides.
With all three promoted sides showing their teeth after a summer where the Premier League’s big beasts have shamelessly feasted on the rest, neither of those factors appears to be in play this season. Which could make for an awful lot of fun.
Tottenham 0-1 Bournemouth: Xavi sees why he’s needed as Cherries end Spurs’ unbeaten start
One of the great features of Spursiness is the way it so often seems to be specifically designed to torture the club’s fans into genuine madness.
And they do love to make sure the whiplash is as severe as possible when the rug is pulled from under a fanbase the club itself seems to genuinely despise. Two wins from two had been followed by the sort of statement signing that prompts inevitable overexcitement.
Xavi Simons was in the building but unavailable, on precisely the sort of occasion where precisely his sort of football was required. Yet if Spurs could just find a way past Bournemouth they would have likely gone into the international break top of the league and full of joy.
Long-term Spurs watchers will be ahead of us here, but those two words ‘international break’ are enough to tell you that simply couldn’t happen.
Spurs have now ensured their supporters have spent the last seven international breaks stewing on a defeat – and usually a particularly wretched one. The last time they won directly before an international break was a scarcely deserved 1-0 win in October 2023 against Luton, who have since been relegated twice.
Since then, Spurs have lost before international breaks to Wolves (from 1-0 up at 90 minutes), Fulham (3-0), Newcastle, Brighton (from 2-0 up at half-time), Ipswich (at home), Fulham (again) and now Bournemouth in a game that should have ended far more compellingly than 1-0 to the visitors such was their dominance.
Andoni Iraola’s side controlled the game to an astonishing degree after a half-awake Spurs defence with Cristian Romero inattentive and a dawdling Djed Spence playing Evanilson onside to score what would prove to be the only goal.
That it remained the only goal was mostly down to a lack of clinical finishing from the visitors, because Spurs created nothing.
Iraola really is a genius; to have had the heart ripped out of his defence the way he has this summer and then set his team up to so utterly nullify Spurs was a huge achievement, even allowing for the role Spurs played in their own downfall by appearing to regard such concepts as ‘ideas’ or ‘movement’ as essentially cheating.
This was a world away from the varied but excellent performances under Thomas Frank against PSG, Burnley and Man City, and a perhaps necessary reality check for just how far off proper, sensible clubs last year’s 17th-place finishers remain.
Not one of Spurs’ efforts troubled Bournemouth. All of Spurs’ effort will have troubled Spurs.
Wolves 2-3 Everton: Grealish secures inevitable cult hero status on true Enjoying His Football day out
A happy Jack Grealish is something surely all of us can get behind. Okay, maybe not Wolves fans.
But for the rest of us there is undoubted joy in watching him simply Enjoying His Football again as he took his assist tally for the season to four with two more in an entertaining win over Wolves. Some players really are just more effective as the brightest shining light in a more ordinary team than as another cog in a brilliant machine.
There’s no shame in that. There’s nothing wrong with that. And Grealish is one such player. He doesn’t turn 30 until next month; there really could be an awful lot left to come in a career that now has all the baubles and trimmings of being part of Man City’s stunning run of recent success.
But one suspects that what Grealish might achieve at Everton might just bring him far more joy than trophies and medals ever could. Although he might miss the parades.
